Stephan: Republicans also don't like educated peasants. They want them indoctrinated with the usual willfully ignorant christofascist racism, so they can be easily manipulated and inflamed. And the agent Trump has appointed to carry out this task is Betsy DeVos. She doesn't even hide it anymore.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos admitted that she was trying to use the ongoing coronavirus crisis to push through her private school choice agenda during a Tuesday radio interview.DeVos made the comments during an interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, on his Sirius XM show. The interview was first flagged by the nonprofit education news outlet Chalkbeat.
“Am I correct in understanding what your agenda is?” he asked.
“Yes, absolutely,” DeVos replied. “For more than three decades, that has been something that I’ve been passionate about. This whole pandemic has brought into clear focus that everyone has been impacted, and we shouldn’t be thinking about students that are in public schools versus private schools.”
Department of Education spokeswoman Angela Morabito said […]
Stephan: Here is something else pulled from the racist christofascist sewers to run for Congress as a Republican.
Republican congressional candidate Ted Howze is running in a central California district. Credit: Howze for Congress/AP
Republican congressional candidate Ted Howze said earlier this month he had nothing to do with social media posts from his personal accounts that demeaned Muslims, accused prominent Democrats of murder and mocked a survivor of the Parkland school shooting.
The “negative and ugly ideas,” he asserted, were penned by others whom he’d given access to his accounts, but he declined to name them.
In the weeks since his denial, new questions have emerged about that explanation.
At least a dozen additional posts from Howze’s account over a two-year period espouse conspiracy theories, suggest Hillary Clinton and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) are responsible for murder, ordenigrate Dreamers, Islam and the Black Lives Matter movement. As of Tuesday afternoon, they were accessible on his personal Facebook account.
Howze, his party’s nominee in a competitive central California district, is endorsed by the National Republican Congressional Committee and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy. He explicitly signed his name to one of these posts and tags […]
Stephan: Half the tweets you read about the Coronavirus are bot-generated and, as this report states: "The Bot Sentinel analysis also concluded that most of the tweets from coronavirus-based bots were favorable to the president."
This is the first time in history, that I can think of, that a pandemic sickening 1.6 million, and killing nearly, as of today, 100,000 people has been managed not with healthcare in mind but to support the re-election of a man who let it happen in the first place.
The novel Coronavirus
If you’ve read a recent social media posting that offers some questionable advice or dubious news about COVID-19, you’re not alone. In fact, users on Twitter have, on average, about a 50 percent chance of reading information regarding the disease that most likely came from a bot, according to findings from a recent study.
Bots are “automated user accounts that interact with Twitter using an application programming interface” to tweet, retweet and even message human users online, according to consumer software company Symantec. They can sometimes be used for good reasons — such as providing information on weather or earthquakes to relevant users — but they can be used for iniquitous purposes, too, like interfering in the political process or waging disinformation campaigns on topics their developers want to promote. Some research suggests that as many as 15 […]
Stephan: Saudi Arabia, one of the most regressive nations on the planet, whose ruler ordered the killing of an American journalist, and whose record about women is somewhere in the 11th century was supposed to be one of Donald Trump's big geopolitical victories.
I am afraid not. Like everything else Trump touches reality and his bombast about it have very little correlation. Here is the latest.
MBS and Trump
President Donald Trump has become a relentless booster for weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, despite the kingdom’s increasing authoritarianism under the rule of its de-facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The president has bragged at times that arms deals with the country would create anywhere from 500,000 to “over a million” jobs. Even after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi put pressure on the United States to reconsider its alliance with the country, Trump released a lengthy statement defending the kingdom, noting specifically that its commitment to buy US weapons “will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth for the United States.”
Well, according to a new report, those claims haven’t come close to panning out, despite the Trump administration fast-tracking $8 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last year. (In an interesting confluence of news, we now know this move was being investigated by the State Department inspector general who Trump fired last week.)
A report from the left-leaning think tank Center for International Policy looks at […]
Stephan: I started to write and say where do they find these people? But, as I did so, I realized there is nothing special about this woman's tacky craziness. This is the Republican Party; she got nearly 50% of the vote. The Republican Party of Dwight Eisenhower, Everett Dirksen, Margaret Chase Smith, and Nelson Rockefeller is gone, replaced by Devin Nunes, Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, and Martha McSally.
The United States has reached such a level of tribalism that The Great Schism Trend I have been writing about since Obama's first campaign is reaching a level where I don't see how it reconciles. I am not sure these people will accept Joe Biden and a woman, particularly a Black woman without violence.
Joe Rae Perkins | Man holding a Q sign waits in line with others to enter a campaign rally Credit: AP/Matt Rourke
Oregon Republicans voted on Tuesday to nominate a QAnon conspiracy theorist to challenge incumbent Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., in November.
Jo Rae Perkins, the former chair of the Linn County Republican Party, defeated three other candidates in Tuesday’s Republican primary with nearly 50% of the vote.
Perkins took to Twitter to celebrate her victory and pledge her allegiance to “Q.”
“Where we go one, we go all,” she said, reciting the QAnon slogan in a video that has since been deleted. “I stand with President Trump. I stand with Q and the team. Thank you Anons, and thank you patriots. And together, we can save our republic.”
The QAnon conspiracy theory began on the far-right message board 4chan, where an anonymous poster who calls himself “Q” writes clues to followers. QAnon supporters believe that a secretive network of deep state officials and liberal elites are running a global child sex trafficking ring and trying to […]
